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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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So you miss cheap servants? I suggest relocating full time to South Africa or Brazil or something. Rich countries pay their service workers well enough for it to be out of reach of the upper middle class, except maybe as an occasional splurge.

Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded. The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

You put it a bit more uncharitably, I don't think there's anything wrong with people being able to afford to live cheaply if they want. In America we prop this lifestyle up with welfare schemes- why is that more dignified?

Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded

This is my hope for an AI scenario: the downward pressure on labor cost should make services all around so much better. Of course, this really would only be good overall if the deflationary effects made up for it in total purchasing power.

God I don't even want to think about what AI-induced deflation would do to the financial system. Luckily the AIs will all be hyper-optimized to get consumers to spend money instead of saving it.

IMO the horror stories of deflation seem oversold for modest values of deflation (let's say low single digit percentages). I understand the theory, but there have been market sectors with drastic deflation in the last few decades (computers!) where you really could defer a purchase 12 months for a drastically better product, and yet they still sold like hotcakes and the market was considered "booming".

The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.

If you're talking about compute specifically then that is true in a sense but cheaper computers aren't really available and it's not really an option to buy them from a user perspective anyway because hardware requirements rise just in line with hardware improvements. I was fine with 2013s smartphones and I'm using them identically today, but those aren't available anymore and even if they were they'd probably not be usable anyway.

but cheaper computers aren't really available and

My cheap Chromebook (under $200 in 2024 dollars) is a much more capable machine than any of the machines in this Gateway 2000 catalog from 1995 that started at $1799 in 1995 dollars (75MHz Pentium, lol). It lacks a CD and 3.5" floppy drive, but supports WiFi and Bluetooth and has a comparably sized display. It's almost certainly faster emulating that Pentium than the original.

The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.

This can't be true, right? The original 8GB iPhone was $600 at the time. The 128GB Pixel 9a launched at $500.

And the equivalent to the pixel 9a in 2013 was the nexus 5 that cost 350$.

I can not get a phone that works similarly well today for 350$, regardless of what the system specs say, the software requirements for the same programs with the same functions are higher for no goddamn reason.

Oh yeah, certainly, sector-specific deflation is usually good, because it means that real productivity/quality gains are happening. It's generalized deflation which kills the economy, I believe, because it kills the availability of credit and the velocity of the money supply. Even if there's an increase in general productivity, the effects on the financial system would be extremely dire. But I'm not sold on AI causing deflation - if anything, if AI creates a strong deflationary pressure, then it makes sense for the government to print money to pay for debt/entitlements.

I don’t think the western model of debt for DoorDash is good; I think below-market housing should be more available.

At the same time, the native poor living better lives is good. They notice the improvement far more than the upper middle class notice getting to eat out more and better. Social equality is neither an idol nor a particularly bad thing.

The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

This is partially due to density and economies of scale making operating costs lower. You still get this in richer places like Singapore and to a lesser extent in most of East Asia. There's a culture of having shops with 2-3 unique items, each with some minor variations, on the menu and high throughput.

The west has many places like this- fried chicken places, for example, often serve fried chicken and fries with only portion sizes differentiating the different option, maybe one is served as a sandwich.

The degree to which this is the case in East Asia is like, at least 5 times more than in the west. Any random food court in Thailand has probably 12 to 20 highly specialized food places that are all cheap and fresh, you're lucky if a random mall in the US has 8 food establishments in business, let alone cheap and fresh ones... Your average major mall in Thailand probably has 30-40 businesses just for food, not even counting the special booths that usually pop up for limited events that expand the count by another 20 or more. Truly blew my mind the first time I was in Thailand

Are we talking about outside of Bangkok?

Yeah, I went to Chiang Mai and Pattaya and it's the same way, we took a boat to a random island in the gulf and there were dozens of food vendors in the port, a beach on the coast we went to had endless food stalls. The density and variety of food options are staggering, you can't walk down a street without some woman cooking the best basil pork or whatever you've ever tried

Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Bangkok, these are all heavily touristed areas, which I would argue give a different picture of Thailand than you would get from a more local experience.

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